Schedule: Speakers

Michael leads the application platform and services development for the company’s next-generation Palm webOS platform. He has extensive experience in building technically challenging web-based applications and services.

Before joining Palm, Michael was the general manager of .NET Online Services at Microsoft, where he led efforts to deliver a services platform that enabled the development of large-scale Internet-based services. Prior to Microsoft, he co-founded Passenger Inc., where he served as chairman and led the development of the company’s consumer marketing SAAS platform. Michael also founded Composite Software, creator of industry-leading enterprise information integration software, where he served as the CEO/CTO.

Michael holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from California Polytechnic State University, and has completed coursework toward a Ph.D. at the University... Read More.

Ever wondered what would happen if we could rethink a decade worth of design changes? Drizzle is a fork of the MySQL server targeted at web development and cloud computing. We are looking at how to create database for modern multi-core, large memory databases that fit inside of an overall application framework.

John has worked in systems operations for over fourteen years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr. He is now VP of Tech Operations at Etsy, and is the author of The Art of Capacity Planning published by O’Reilly.

Dion Almaer is the founder of a brand new company named Set Direction where he has the pleasure of working with Ben Galbraith. The pair co-founded Ajaxian.com together and they are now focused on helping developers deliver fantastic experiences and working to set the direction of the software industry as a whole.

Dion has been a technologist and a developer writing Web applications since it took over from Gopher. He has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles, a book, and of course covers life the universe and everything on his blog at almaer.com/blog.

He has been called a human aggregator, and you can see that in full force if you follow him on Twitter @dalmaer.

As an interaction designer for Adaptive Path and formerly for Lextant, Alexa has immersed herself in the worlds of nuclear pharmacists, smartphone users and diabetics. Her curiosity about people different from herself is reflected in work from the MySpace redesign to the Charmr insulin pump concept.

Having received her Bachelor of Science in Visual Communication at Ohio State University, Alexa cares about the craft of design. She strives to advance design tools and methods through blogging, writing and speaking. Recent appearances include Boxes and Arrows, UX Week 2008 in San Francisco and LIFT 2008 in South Korea.

Matt Asay is vice president of mobile at Adobe. With more than a decade in open source and its application in Big Data and mobile, Asay most recently ran community, marketing and business development at MongoDB, and has served as VP of business development at real-time analytics company Nodeable (acquired by Appcelerator in October 2012); VP of business development at mobile HTML5 start-up Strobe (now part of Facebook); chief operating officer at Canonical, the Ubuntu Linux company; GM, Americas and VP of business development at Alfresco; and part of the team that helped put Novell on its open source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and earned his juris doctorate at Stanford, where he focused on open... Read More.

John Battelle, 45, is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author who has founded or co-founded scores of online, conference, magazine, and other media businesses.

In addition to his work at Federated Media, one of the largest media companies on the Internet, Battelle continues to serve as the Executive Producer and Program Chair of the Web 2 Summit, as well as a partner with BoingBoing.net. Battelle also maintains Searchblog, an ongoing analysis site that covers the intersection of media, technology, and culture at www.battellemedia.com.

Previously, Battelle occupied the Bloomberg chair in Business Journalism for the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Chairman and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior... Read More.

Jen Bekman is an art-dealer, curator, writer, and entrepreneur whose inventive approach to the art world has created new models for connecting artists and collectors. Her experience as an internet media executive informs a multi-faceted enterprise, including her eponymous Manhattan gallery (which pioneered the Lower East Side art scene upon its opening in 2003), the online endeavor 20×200 (a place to buy limited-edition fine-art prints at ridiculously affordable prices), and the international photography competition Hey, Hot Shot!

Jen Bekman’s projects have been featured in numerous international publications including, The New York Times, Art in America, Der Spiegel, Martha Stewart Living, and Wired. She frequently lectures and participates in panels about art, technology, media and marketing and is a popular portfolio reviewer... Read More.

Veronica Belmont is a co-host of Revision3’s Tekzilla. She started her tech career as an audio producer for CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast and quickly became the third co-host. She went on to start two other shows at CNET: MP3 Insider and Crave and also produced many tech how-to videos and segments for CNET TV. Since then, Veronica has been a regular on many technology and gaming-themed podcasts, such as This Week in Tech, Cranky Geeks, DL.TV, The Instance and more. In the past year she hosted the popular web show Mahalo Daily, where she covered lots of geek-themed topics and events, including CES with Engadget and the Game Developers Conference with Joystiq. In her free time, Veronica hosts the Sword and... Read More.

Christophe Bisciglia joins Cloudera from Google, where he created and managed their Academic Cloud Computing Initiative. Starting in 2007, he began working with the University of Washington to teach students about Google’s core data management and processing technologies – MapReduce and GFS. This quickly brought Hadoop into the curriculum, and has since resulted in an extensive partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) which makes Google-hosted Hadoop clusters available for research and education worldwide. Beyond his work with Hadoop, he holds patents related to search quality and personalization, and spent a year working in Shanghai. Christophe earned his degree, and remains a visiting scientist, at the University of Washington.

Mr. Black most recently cofounded and was CEO of Boundary. He a recognized expert in large-scale technology infrastructure design, implementation,and operation. Previously, he was an engineering director in the ECN group at Microsoft Windows Live, where he helped build one of the largest content delivery networks in the world. As the manager of website engineering at Amazon, he lead the design and implementation of a new, layer 3 network for Amazon’s production network. As principal engineer for Amazon infrastructure, he co-authored the first documents on what later became EC2. As senior manager for information security, he owned and successfully delivered Sarbanes-Oxley and PCIDSS compliance for Amazon infrastructure, including the... Read More.

John is the lead architect for our new IBM Mashup Center Product. He has
been a Architect for WebSphere Portal since it began and has been Chief
Programmer for WebSphere Portal. Before that he was Chief Programmer for
several other products and is IBM Master Inventor with over a dozen
patents.

Jeff Bonforte is the CEO of Xobni. He’s worked in email, voice and messaging for more than 10 years. Prior to joining Xobni in 2008, Bonforte was VP of Social Search at Yahoo!, where he ran Yahoo! Answers and Delicious. Jeff also ran Yahoo! Messenger and oversaw its move from #2 to #1 IM client in the US. Before Yahoo!, Jeff was President and Founder of Gizmo5, an innovator in VoIP that was purchased by Google in 2008. In 1997 Jeff founded and was the CEO of i-drive, the largest online storage tool of the time, with over 10mm monthly unique visitors.

Jeff earned his BA in Classical Civilizations He lives in San Francisco with his wife, son and dog.

I’ve been doing this stuff for a while, and still can’t quite say what “this stuff” means. I can guarantee that it has to do with technology and usability and transparency and the goal is to make your day better. At least.

Daniel Bouie is Senior Planner for Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Daniel has been involved in all aspects of creating applications for Windows Mobile for over five years, and has been active in the mobile applications industry for more than ten years.

I am best known these days for my writing (and the thinking behind it, I hope) at /Message, hence the /Messengers. I am obsessed with social tools, and their impact on business, media, and society. I coined the term “social tools” in 1999, the same year I started blogging, and I haven’t looked back since. Writing and working with clients takes most of my time, but I also speak at various events, such as Reboot, Lift, Shift, Mesh, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, Under The Radar, Next08, and Web 2.0 Expo, to name only a few.

As the community manager for Project Zero, Ryan is immersed in the intersecting worlds of Agile software, social media, web application developers and open communities. Ryan Boyles is a software developer in IBM Application Integration Middleware Software where he seeks daily opportunities to help simplify the development of situational applications. Project Zero is the community driving commercial development of IBM WebSphere sMash with continuous feedback and open development. He fosters collaboration using social software to break down barriers with the understanding that Web2.0 is about people, disruption and amplified serendipity; not technology. Ryan is obsessed with mobile and declarative living, and the impact of the social web on business, society, and everyday life. Ryan has been developing web applications and user interfaces throughout... Read More.

In the fall of 2007, Zach J. Brand joined NPR Digital Media to oversee the technical strategy and operation of NPR’s content on new media platforms, including NPR.org, podcasts and mobile devices. He has focused on developing extensible and re-usable architectures for tools and content which support both NPR branded products as well as NPR member station’s efforts.

Prior to joining NPR, Brand spent over twelve years at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. At different times his responsibilities included both application development leadership and infrastructure management for the various websites produced by WPNI including www.washingotnpost.com, www.newsweek.com, www.slate.com and BudgetTravel Online. He played key roles in development of... Read More.

Denis Browne brings more than fifteen years of enterprise software market experience to his current role as SAP Senior Vice President responsible for the Business User Imagineering team within the company’s Emerging Solutions product group. Mr. Browne’s team explores and develops emerging technologies and business models that provide SAP customers with new solutions to improve their performance in the global marketplace. In pointing to SAP future solutions, Mr. Browne and his team regularly consult with early-stage startup companies in the San Francisco Bay area, providing professional research and guidance.

Prior to joining SAP, Mr. Browne spent eight years working with startups as a founder, chief technology officer, and product manager, including with Software as a Service, a Web services platform company... Read More.

John Bruno is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft on the Windows Marketplace for Mobile team. John is the co-author of the book Solid Code (Microsoft Press, 2009) and has over 10 years of application development experience. He specializes in designing and building scalable Web-based applications and services using Microsoft .NET technologies.

Bob Buch is Vice President of Business Development for Digg where he leads syndication efforts and manages the company’s relationships with strategic partners. Bob manages a team responsible for driving new user growth, deeper engagement, and increased revenue through the development of key partnerships.

Prior to joining Digg in 2007, Bob spent more than nine years working in the online media space. During law school he founded AimTV, a pioneer of video advertising on the web. After AimTV sold to Netzero (NASDAQ:UNTD) in 1999, Bob joined Macromedia’s business development group. Bob also co-founded Fluid Music, where he worked with American Idol and Billboard to bring emerging artist websites to market under those brands.

Tim Cadogan is the chief executive officer of OpenX. OpenX’s purpose is to help businesses worldwide grow by providing compelling, open online advertising products and services that drive revenues. Today, OpenX’s primary product is the world’s leading independent ad server, which is used by more than 35,000 publishers on more than 150,000 websites across the Internet. More than 300 billion ad impressions run through OpenX software every month. OpenX is used by websites in more than 100 countries around the world and has been translated by its community of users into 25 languages. OpenX is headquartered in Pasadena with offices in London and Poznan, Poland.

From 2003-2008 Tim was at Yahoo!, most recently as Senior Vice President of Global Advertising Marketplaces overseeing the primary advertising... Read More.

As Senior Director of Channel and Direct Sales, Scott Calvert brings over a decade of sales management experience and channel expertise in the technology sector to Verio Inc., a subsidiary of NTT Communications, one of the largest companies in the world. Calvert leads all sales efforts on behalf of the company as well as the strategic direction of the viaVerio partner program which includes over 2,500 active partners. In 2009, Calvert was awarded the highly coveted “Channel Chief” recognition by CRN Magazine for his commitment and dedication to the channel.

Prior to joining Verio, Calvert was Vice President of Sales, on demand, for managed security services provider MX Logic, where he developed a hybrid sales model which included both direct and channel organizations.... Read More.

Rich Cannings is an information security engineer at Google, specializing in web and mobile security. He co-authored “Hacking Exposed Web 2.0: Security Secrets and Solutions” and wrote the first book chapter on Flash security. Rich has a joint master degree in Mathematics and Computer Science specializing in cryptography from the University of Calgary.

As Senior Vice President of Platform and CTO of Marketplaces, Mark Carges is responsible for accelerating the company’s platform innovation and he is also responsible for overseeing the technology architecture, software development and site operations for eBay.com.

Prior to joining eBay in September 2008, Mark was Executive Vice President, Products and General Manager, for the Business Interaction Division at BEA Systems, a provider of enterprise application infrastructure software that was acquired by Oracle in April 2008. During more than a decade at BEA, Mark held a variety of other senior technology leadership roles, including Chief Technology Officer.

Mark began his career at Bell Labs as one of the original architects of Tuxedo, software for constructing highly scalable transaction processing applications. Prior to... Read More.

Trae Chancellor joined salesforce.com as CIO in 2006. Under his leadership, the IT division successfully transitioned its operations to the ‘cloud’. Building on salesforce.com’s own platform as a service, force.com, Trae & his team deployed new automation systems that effectively supported the business as it grew from $400 million in annual revenue to $1 billion.

Today Trae serves as salesforce.com’s VP of Enterprise Strategy. In this role, Trae shares his experience of ‘taking it to the cloud’ with large enterprises, helping them construct best-practices model for how to successfully adopt cloud-based computing. Additionally, Trae will transform these best practices into market-meeting requirements for salesforce.com’s emerging applications & platform.

Prior to salesforce.com, Trae was V.P. of IT Application Engineering at PeopleSoft/Oracle. While there, he drove... Read More.

Andre Charland is the co-founder and CEO at Nitobi Inc. He’s been involved in Internet software development for almost a decade. As an advocate for usability and user experience, he speaks regularly on Ajax and web usability. Most recently Andre presented at MAX, the Adobe AIR Bus Tour, and AjaxWorld. Andre is the co-author of “Enterprise Ajax”, published by Prentice Hall this summer, and maintains his own blog at http://blogs.nitobi.com/andre.

Isabelle Christensen has been active in the US Solar industry since 2006. She has in-depth knowledge in the downstream as well as upstream US solar market.
She gives lectures in marketing, solar and social entrepreneurships at leading universities such as INSEAD and London School of Economics in Europe and Stanford University and Harvard University in United States. She is also an active volunteer for Doctors without Borders and United Nations’ Climate Group. Her hobbies include hiking, backpacking, reading and travelling.

Michael is the senior vice president of technology responsible for the software development and product planning processes to enhance Photobucket’s services. He is also responsible for the software architecture, infrastructure, content moderation and user experience. Michael has more than twelve years of experience developing network and system architectures. Prior to Photobucket, Michael provided engineering services to large enterprise accounts for Network Appliance. Michael has held various director level engineering and technical roles at TouchAmerica, TiGi Corporation, Philips Electronics LMS, Internet Communications Corporation, MediaOne Group, and Citrix Systems. Michael has a BS Degree from the University of Denver.

Alistair is a principal at analyst firm Bitcurrent, and a frequent contributor to the GigaOm family of sites. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded"Coradiant":http://www.coradiant.com, a leader in online user monitoring, as well as research firm Networkshop. He has held product management positions with 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology.

Alistair has coordinated and spoken at a wide range of industry events, including Interop, Structure, Web2Expo and Unconference. He is the author of numerous articles on Internet performance and security, and co-author of Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Applications from Prentice-Hall.

Alistair is currently working on the forthcoming Watching Websites for O’Reilly.

Prior to joining Vignette, he served at Microsoft as director for worldwide developer audience marketing and community. His responsibilities included managing the developer experience and loyalty, the Microsoft developer network portal and the Imagine Cup, the World’s largest student technology competition. As the owner for the Broad Customer Connection initiative, he led the company’s community strategy across online and offline channels including blogs, forums, wikis, user groups, influencers and content syndication.

Shawn Dahlen graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelors and masters degree in computer engineering. During his time at school, he was a research assistant for the Living Schoolbook focused on collaboration within the education space. Additionally, he was a seasonal employee at the MITRE Corporation working within the emerging web technologies organization.

He joined Lockheed Martin within the Transformation Program of the IS&S CIO organization in 2003. During the next few years, he led technical efforts to deliver a program management dashboard and the re-architecture of the IS&S Portal following a services model to integrate with back-office systems. In early 2005, he promoted blog and wiki technology as advantageous to business collaboration and received funding for a pilot effort branded LMExpressions. With... Read More.

Marc Davis is Chief Scientist and VP of ESP (Early Stage Products) for Yahoo! Mobile. Marc and his team invent and help realize the future of mobile, social, media, monetization, and platforms. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of sociotechnical systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people around the world to produce, describe, share, and remix media, and to connect to each other in new ways. ESP has been involved in innovative upcoming products from Yahoo! Connected Life such as oneConnect, which reinvents mobile communications by aggregating a user’s social networks and... Read More.

Tom Deutsch serves as a Program Director in IBM’s Information Management in the CTO’s office. Tom works with a team focused on emerging technology and is helping customers adopt IBM innovative Enterprise Mashups offering. Tom came to IBM through the FileNet acquisition, where he had responsibility for FileNet’s flagship Content Management product and spearheaded FileNet product initiatives with other IBM software segments including the Lotus and InfoSphere segments.With more than 20 years in the industry, Deutsch is an expert on both the technical and strategic business issues facing the Enterprise today. In his professional past, Deutsch founded two successful startup companies and served at the management level at several large end-user organizations. Deutsch earned a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University in New... Read More.

Shion is an executive at Creeris Ventures, a venture capital and incubation firm. At Creeris, Shion works on the management teams of a few of the firm’s portfolio companies, including Computational Crawling and Plura Processing. With both companies, his primary responsibilities are marketing, business development, and assisting with overall strategy. He also helps implement customer-facing technologies for these companies.

Prior to joining Creeris, Shion ran his own software consulting firm that developed predictive software for the oil industry. Shion holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Rice University.

Born in Bulgaria, Angel Djambazov has spent his professional career in the fields of journalism and online marketing. In his journalistic career he worked as an editor on several newspapers and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Wyoming Homes and Living Magazine. Later his career path led to online marketing where while working at OnlineShoes he earned the Affiliate Manager of the Year (2006) award at the Affiliate Summit, and In-house Manager of the Year (2006) award by ABestWeb. Currently Angel is the OPM for Jones Soda, leads the marketing efforts of PopShops.com which was awarded Best Affiliate Tool (2007) award by ABestWeb, and is the Managing Editor for Revenews.com.

Angel lives north of Seattle, spending his free time reading up on obscure scientific references... Read More.

Curt ensures that Ascentium provides the best business solutions and highest satisfaction to clients. Before cofounding Ascentium, Curt was chief technology officer for ContractorHub.com. Curt served as chief technology officer at Data Dimensions, founded Redmond Technology Partners, a regional systems integrator. Along with Jim Beebe, Curt championed the development of the application consulting organization at Excell Data.
Curt is a member of the Mises Institute, a think tank for market-driven policy, researching and writing about the evolutionary nature of knowledge and certainty in business, society, and government. Curt received an M.S. in computer science from Central Connecticut State University and a B.F.A. from the University of Hartford.

As CEO of one of the largest woman-owned businesses in the Silicon Valley, Nancy has worked with the top brands and thought leaders in the world helping them develope their presentations. She has recently distilled over 20 years of experience into a visually rich book called slide:ology.

Scott Dunlap is the CEO of NearbyNow, Inc, which has developed “Google for shopping malls” – a service that allows a consumer to find any product, brand, or sale in a mall using the Internet or mobile phone. This allows retailers and brands to target nearby consumers with a “high intent to buy”.

Scott has over 14 years of experience in the technology field, and has been an early executive at a number of successful companies such as E.piphany Software (9th highest IPO of 1999), Loudcloud/Opsware (IPO, 2001), 4charity.com (sold to Innovaware), and Avolent. He has a BS from the University of Oregon, and an MBA from Stanford University.

Stephen Elop joined Nokia as President and Chief Executive Officer as of September 21, 2010.

Most recently, Stephen served as president of Microsoft’s Business Division and was a member of Microsoft’s senior leadership team responsible for the company’s overall strategy. In this position, he oversaw the Microsoft Office systems and other communications tools and applications for consumers, small and mid-size businesses, as well as large organizations and enterprises.

Previously Stephen was Chief Operating Officer of Juniper Networks, a leading provider of high-performance network infrastructure. As COO, he was responsible for the company’s product groups, corporate development, global sales and service, as well as marketing and manufacturing organizations. Prior to Juniper, Stephen served as president of worldwide field operations of Adobe Systems Inc. He joined... Read More.

Dave Engberg is a technology entrepreneur with a background in building systems that can scale to support massive numbers of users. This includes both high-volume mobile/embedded solutions as well as back-end service infrastructures. Before joining Evernote, Dave was the founder and CTO of CoreStreet, Ltd, where he designed and built identity management and digital credential validation systems used widely across the US Government and elsewhere. Prior to CoreStreet, he served as the CTO of Driveway, Inc., an online data storage service with over ten million subscribers, and VP of Engineering for JSource, which built smart card virtual machines used in tens of millions of mobile phones in Europe. Dave also served as architect and developer at Gemplus, Taligent and Stanford Medical School.

Jyri Engeström co-founded microblogging service Jaiku with Petteri Koponen in 2006. A native of Helsinki, Finland, he moved to San Francisco when Google acquired Jaiku in 2007. He is currently Product Manager at Google, where he has been responsible for areas of Google’s social infrastructure including Google Profiles, Google’s sharing model, and the Social Graph API. Prior to Jaiku he occupied the position of Senior Product Manager at Nokia, responsible for Nokia’s Linux-based Internet Handhelds products. A sociologist by training, he is noted for coining the term ‘social objects’ to refer to photos, bookmarks, and other shareable Web content. He blogs at zengestrom.com.

Philip Fierlinger is the Head of Design at Xero. Xero is an online accounting platform, which was awarded one of the Top 10 Application User Interfaces of 2008 by NielsenNorman Group. Philip established the agile design methodology used at Xero, which is centered on rapid prototyping.

Prior to Xero, Philip worked extensively on NewZealand.com, which received several Webby Awards.

In 1994, Philip founded Turntable, a digital design firm in San Francisco that did groundbreaking websites and interactive videos for bands and record labels, plus technology companies like Apple, Sony and Palm.

Brady Forrest is Program Chair for O’Reilly’s Where and co-chair for Android Open . Additionally, he co-chaired the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search (he came to Microsoft when it acquired MongoMusic). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds cars for Burning Man and runs Ignite. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey.

Maggie Fox is the founder and CEO of SocialMediaGroup.com, one of the world’s largest independent agencies helping business navigate the new socially engaged Web. Widely acknowledged as industry-leading pioneers, SMG has created and executed social media strategies for Ford Motor Company, SAP, Yamaha Motor and Harlequin Publishing.

Maggie is a communications and content expert who has never met a medium she didn’t like. Over the course of her career, she has led teams that have marketed, written and produced television and web content for some of the biggest and best-known brands in North America, including Sears, Deloitte and Disney. Maggie is often asked to speak to the press and business groups about the importance and use of social media in the enterprise.

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience and how all business silos (including developers and marketers) can work together towards greater search visibility at ninebyblue.com

She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners and Features Editor at Search Engine Land. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search. Her book, Marketing in the Age of Google, provides a blueprint for incorporating search strategy into organizations of all levels.

Anthony Franco is the president of EffectiveUI, the leading provider of rich Internet, desktop and mobile applications for Fortune 1000 companies. He has an extensive background in providing award-winning RIAs and user experience consulting to enterprise companies. An industry veteran with more than 10 years of experience, Anthony began developing RIAs for Warner Brothers in 1998. He has also authored several industry white papers and articles, including an Adobe Flex business guide published by O’Reilly Media. EffectiveUI’s client portfolio includes Ford Motor Company, GE, Adobe, United Airlines, NBC Universal and Discovery Networks.

A Blue State Digital founding partner, Jascha brings more than a decade’s experience in software development in the corporate, nonprofit, and political spheres to his role as Blue State Digital’s Chief Technology Officer. He manages the company’s technology staff and operations out of Blue State Digital’s technology center near downtown Boston, including the infrastructure, maintenance and enhancement of the Blue State Digital Online Tools, and technology client services. Blue State Digital spearheaded Obama for America’s extensive online fundraising, constituency building and peer-to-peer networking initiatives, all of which helped to create momentum for the President-elect’s successful campaign in 2008’s historic election. For the campaign, Jascha managed the team that built and ran the my.barackobama.com technology platform, and worked directly with Obama for America’s New Media... Read More.

Ben Galbraith, together with his long-time friend Dion Almaer, forms one-half of the dynamic “Ben and Dion” duo that founded Ajaxian.com, headed Developer Tools at Mozilla, ran Developer Relations at Palm and is now running mobile architecture and engineering at Walmart.com after being acquired along with their start-up team in early 2011. Ben’s been writing code since he was six and starting businesses since he was ten; he’s written books, given hundreds of award-winning presentations world-wide, produced a few technical conferences, sold three companies, and has held CEO, CIO, CTO, and Software Architect positions in the medical, publishing, media, consumer electronics, advertising, software and internet industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and six children.

Liz Gannes has been a Silicon Valley-based business technology reporter covering web startups for more than four years. She founded NewTeeVee in 2006 and has lead the NewTeeVee team in creating the premier publication for news and analysis in the online video world. She still contributes to GigaOM.com on more general web-related topics. Prior to GigaOM, Gannes was a reporter for Red Herring. She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in linguistics.

William Gaultier is a Marketing professional with 19 years of corporate & consulting experience. As CEO of e-Storm International, he is helping organizations with corporate positioning, marketing planning, and implementations services in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Online Advertising & Multi-channel analytics in the US, Europe and Asia. Since 1998, he has helped more than 100 organizations such as Shogakukan, Muvee, Bank of America, Behr, Hewlett-Packard, Wells Fargo Bank, Fair Isaac, National University, Vayama, Leading Hotels of the World, Verizon, and Hanley Wood.

Prior to starting e-Storm, Gaultier created The Hoffman Agency’s interactive marketing practice, servicing existing clients in their Internet marketing and public relations needs. Prior to The Hoffman Agency, Gaultier worked at White+Company, a division of BBDO, where... Read More.

Scott Gerard is a senior consultant for his group’s multi-platform efforts including cloud computing and virtualization technologies, and he has been involved with IBM’s BlueCloud effort since its beginnings.

Kevin Gibbs is the technical lead and manager of the Google App Engine project. Kevin joined Google in 2004. Prior to his work on Google App Engine, Kevin worked for a number of years in Google’s systems infrastructure group, where he worked on the cluster management systems that underly Google’s products and services. Kevin is also the creator of Google Suggest, the product which provides interactive search suggestions as you type on the Google homepage. Prior to joining Google, Kevin worked with the Advanced Internet Technology group at IBM, where he focused on developer tools.

Kevin holds an M.S. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) with Distinction in Research from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Computer Science with Distinction from Stanford.

With 14 years of experience in corporate communications and 9 years of experience at Cisco Systems, Jeanette Gibson leads Cisco’s New Media group. In this role, she is responsible for extending Cisco’s leadership and innovation with new media and overseeing the vision and direction of Cisco’s award winning online newsroom, News@Cisco.

In her role as head of new media strategy, Gibson is responsible for developing and communicating the direction of Cisco’s corporate blogging and podcasting initiatives and driving its web strategy for communications websites, News@Cisco and the Investor Relations and Analyst Relations Websites.

The News@Cisco team is responsible for communicating Cisco’s vision and strategy by leveraging the power of the Internet. Now it its eighth year, News@Cisco’s audience rivals that of mainstream media websites such... Read More.

Maria Giudice is the CEO and Founder of Hot Studio, Inc., a San Francisco-based, human-centered design studio dedicated to making the complex beautifully clear. Maria is considered a pioneer in the field of information architecture and was prominently featured in the 1996 book Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman. In 2002, she was included in the book 1000 Most Creative Individuals in the USA. Maria has coauthored two best-selling books about web design: Web Design Essentials and Elements of Web Design. Since 1997 Maria has lead Hot Studio’s team of individuals dedicated to creating design systems that are both beautiful and highly functional. Maria has more than 20 years of experience working with and mentoring people from many different disciplines. Maria holds a... Read More.

David is Director of Engineering at Google and currently leads the company’s social web efforts. Prior to joining Google in 2006, he successfully started two companies: Verity in 1988 and Eloquent in 1995. Eloquent was later acquired by Open Text in 2005. David has decades of experience working in the technology sector and holds an SB in physics from MIT.

Renny Gleeson is an entrepreneurial geek. He’s been interactive since he got his TRS-80 RadioShack microcomputer in the ‘70s, and he’s worked all sides of the interactive marketing space-from client, to agency, to publisher. Other work experiences include game design, bistro cook, junk bond sales, the NBA, selling clothing to teenage girls and running agencies.

Since 2007, Renny has led interactive strategy for Wieden + Kennedy, embracing mobility, gaming, software as culture, physical computing and every flavor of “social”. Since no-one knows “what’s next”, he co-founded a constantly evolving technology accelerator/incubator called “PIE” in 2009. PIE has become a brand-backed techno-cultural node in Portland, Oregon, and has housed and/or accelerated nearly thirty companies to date.

Heather Gold is an innovative comedian with deep roots in The Valley. She tours North America performing, speaking and hosting conversations at venues from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to Kenyon College to Gotham Comedy Club. For 10 years, she’s been mixing up the Net and in live performances exploring the emotional mechanics of how people connect — for example, how to be “private” in public, how to scale conversation, and how to bring really different people together.

Heather’s best known for quickly cutting through the chaff and “open sourcing” aspects of her shows to highlight insight and humor from the people formerly known as the audience. Heather uses her performance as a lab, bringing insight to technology, business and communities on... Read More.

Keith is a software engineer on Google Maps. He currently leads Google’s “My Maps” team. Keith joined Google in 2005, before which he was a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Washington.

As an evangelist for design ethnography, Kelly Goto is dedicated to understanding how real people integrate products and services into their daily lives.Goto is a sought-after international keynote lecturer and author on the topics of web and mobile strategies, usability, and design ethnography. Her book, Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works has been translated into 14 languages and is an established standard for workflow methodologies and user-centered design principles worldwide.

Kelly is principal of gotomedia, LLC, a global leader in research-driven, people-friendly interface design for web, mobile and product solutions for clients including Seiko Epson Japan, Adobe, VeriSign, Nokia, WebEx and CNET. For the past 20 years, she has worked in the digital media industry launching brands and initiatives for Toyota, Paramount, Infiniti,... Read More.

Jason Grigsby was one of the project leads on the Obama iPhone Application and helped design the user inferface for the Wall Street Journal’s Blackberry application. He founded and organizes Mobile Portland, a local mobile group.

Jason is a co-founder of Cloud Four, a small start-up focused on mobile and web development. He blogs at CloudFour.com and provides a frequent updates about mobile on Twitter.

Jeremiah Grossman is the founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security. He is considered a world-renowned expert in Web security, is a co- founder of the Web Application Security Consortium, and was named to InfoWorld’s Top 25 CTOs for 2007. Grossman is a frequent speaker at industry events including the Black Hat Briefings, RSA, CSI, HiTB, OWASP, ISSA, and a number of large universities. He has authored dozens of articles and white papers; is credited with the discovery of many cutting-edge attack and defensive techniques and is a co-author of XSS Attacks. Grossman is often quoted in major media publications such as SC Magazine, CSO Magazine, InfoWorld, USA Today, Dark Reading, SecurityFocus, and more. Prior to WhiteHat, Grossman... Read More.

Vic joined Google in 2007 as a Vice President of Engineering, responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs. He also oversees applications development. Previously, Vic spent 15 years at Microsoft, where he worked on a variety of products and operating systems, including Windows 3.0, NT, Windows XP, and Vista. He was recognized by MIT as a “Young Innovator under 35” for his work in sparking the Microsoft’s change from Win32 to the .NET programming model.

Most recently, Vic was General Manager of Microsoft’s developer outreach efforts worldwide, including evangelism and strategy for products like Windows Vista, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, Microsoft CRM, and Windows Mobile.

Vic holds two patents in the area of distributed computing and identity-based access to cloud resources.

Kristina Halvorson is the founder and president of Brain Traffic, a content
strategy, information architecture, and web writing agency.

Since 1997, Kristina has led content strategy and web writing projects for
over 100 web sites and several Fortune 500 companies. She is a passionate
advocate for content strategy, the “hidden discipline” that lives between
information architecture, web writing, and the build process.

In 2006-2007, Kristina served as president of the Minnesota Interactive
Marketing Association (MIMA), one of the country’s leading IMAs with nearly
1,000 active members. In 2002, she co-founded the annual MIMA Summit, which
is today widely regarded as the premier regional interactive conference in
the nation.

Eran Hammer-Lahav is an active standards developer and open web advocate, working for @WalmartLabs as architect for the mobile web services team. Most recently was the lead author and editor of the OAuth specifications. Previously, founder of Nouncer, an startup building social content distribution technologies, focused on scalability and performance. Prior to Nouncer, Eran headed software development for financial institutions, and managed tech for political and governmental organizations with focus on social networks. In 1994 Eran founded ‘A Different Stage’, one of the first online publisher for short prose. Eran attended Tel Aviv University Film School and, is an avid farmer, and the owner of three emus all named Kevin.

Prior to Picnik, Mike co-founded Valve Software where he was the director of development for Half-Life, an industry phenomenon that sold more than 10 million copies and won more than 50 “Game of the Year” awards. PC Gamer magazine, the best selling PC games publication, has repeatedly named Half-Life “the best PC game of all time.” Prior to Valve, Mike worked as a development manager for the Microsoft consumer division, Microsoft Windows NT User Interface team and the OS/2 graphics engine team. Mike loves getting into the outdoors, and recently bought a mountain bike that seems to be beating him up.

Scott Heiferman is Chief Organizer of Meetup, dedicated to 21st century local community organizing. Today, millions of people are part of self-organized Meetup Groups around thousands of topics in over 100 countries – with thousands of Meetups (real events) happening daily. Meetup is now a self-sustaining operation, pursuing a long-range dream of a “Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything” – giving everyone access to a local community group when they need it. Heiferman received the Jane Addams Award from the National Conference on Citizenship and the MIT Technology Review “Innovator of the Year”. He graduated from The University of Iowa. http://scott.heiferman.com

Christine Herron has spent her career finding new and innovative information technologies. She is currently a Principal with First Round Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm. Previously, Christine was a director at Omidyar Network, where she developed the Media practice strategy and drove $15 million in early-stage placements.

Prior to joining Omidyar Network in 2005, Christine was the VP of Marketing for Mission Research, which develops small business CRM solutions. While there, she led marketing from initial business plan authoring through paying customer and distribution partner acquisition. Earlier, Christine was the founder and CEO of Mercury2, a software-as-a-service developer of international trade logistics systems, and managed Internet products for both NetObjects and Microsoft.

Christine started as an investor with Geocapital Partners,... Read More.

Prior to founding Reprise Media in 2003, Peter spent over ten years in the interactive space in a series of consulting and management roles, specializing in technology and media.

Peter served as vice president of Strategic Development at Ask.com, a leading search engine. In this role, he created long-term strategies and functioned as a key decision maker in the company’s new business ventures. Peter also held a role as the company’s vice president of Consumer Sales and was responsible for the conceptualization and execution of Ask.com’s e-commerce strategy.

Chris Heuer has been engaged in interactive communications since 1993, and launched his first agency, Guru Communications, out of South Beach, Florida in 1994. Over the years he has helped numerous startups with go-to market strategies, product design, web site development, online marketing campaigns, ecommerce and what is now widely referred to as Social Media.

Seeing similarities between the rise of the Web as a vital communications technology and the current rise of Social Media, Chris formed Social Media Club in March, 2006 to help more people understand the greater significance of what it means to be social and how media production/consumption has changed. To this end, Social Media Club is promoting media literacy, encouraging the sharing of lessons learned, promoting industry standards such as... Read More.

Tony Hillerson is a Software Architect for EffectiveUI. He graduated from Ambassador University with a BA in MIS. On any given day he may be working with Flex, Java, Rails, Maven, Ant, Ruby, or shell scripts. Tony has contributed to and developed on many community projects, such as RubyAMF. He’s written whitepapers, including one on Flex and Live Cycle Data Services, and is currently co-authoring a book on Flex and Rails. This year Tony has spoken at 360|Flex and Adobe MAX, as well as local user groups.

Tony is interested in all levels of usability and experience design, from the database to the server to the glass.

In his free time Tony enjoys playing the bass, playing World of Warcraft, making electronic music,... Read More.

Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist and enterprise architect who works hands-on with clients in the Fortune 500, federal government, and Internet startup community.

Dion helps lead the industry by evolving the thinking for next-generation businesses in various social media including ZDNet’s influential Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog and the Web 2.0 Blog. He is extensively published in leading industry periodicals and journals including the Microsoft Architecture Journal, AjaxWorld Magazine, SOA/Web Services Journal, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Social Computing Journal. His thought leading work has been covered in BusinessWeek, CNET News, Wired Magazine, CIO Magazine, and other well-known news outlets.

Molly E. Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. She has served as Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), has been an invited expert to the W3C, consultant to numerous browser vendors and corporate clients, and has written more than 30 books covering client-side development and design for the Web.

Currently, she works at Opera Software as Web Evangelist, working to improve the quality of life and work for designers and developers worldwide via open standards.

You can keep up with Molly on her personal Web site, where else? http://molly.com/

Half scientist, half entrepreneur, Craig is Red Bricks Media’s Chief Strategist and guardian of the “special sauce” that makes up our marketing strategy. Since 1999, he has been on the cutting edge of Search Engine Optimization, helping a range of clients achieve significant sales improvements through higher search rankings. Craig’s rigorous experimentation and innovative analysis have become the basis for Red Bricks Media’s approach to all SEO engagements. Before Red Bricks Media, Craig founded and was CEO for Community Musician, an online service that grew to over 90,000 members and over six figures in revenue in just one year. When he’s not playing guitar and singing lead in his band, Erogenous Jones, Craig publishes thoughts on his Mostly Search Blog and teaches Search... Read More.

Chuck Hudson is a certified paypal developer, winner of the 2008 eBay Star Developer award, and creator of the first eBay certified eBay on the iphone application in both web and iphone sdk versions. Chuck has consulted to fortune 500 companies on internet and mobile CRM, ecommerce, social networking applications. His experience covers more than 15 years of software and internet application development. Chuck guest lectures at various universities and holds a bachelor’s from Wesleyan University and an MBA from Babson College.

Justin’s diverse software engineering background includes earlier projects of sonar, home automation, and high performance databases. He has also been running and administering Linux systems for 10 years, and brings all that experience and more to his work at Picnik. Being a member of that rare breed, a native Seattleite, Justin doesn’t even notice a weather report of “cloud cover with a chance of rain.”

Steve Huffman co-founded the social news site reddit.com in 2005 with
his college roommate. reddit.com has grown into the largest social
news site and one of the largest communities on the Internet. In 2010,
he co-founded Hipmunk, a travel meta-search site trying to take the
agony out of searching for plane tickets online. As lead engineer at
both these companies, he’s had many technologies adventures and hopes
to share his experiences.

Tara ‘miss rogue’ Hunt has spent most of her adult life online, either participating in or building communities. From the first wave of online marketing when she was in Canada, showing companies how to brave this new medium, all the way to being part of one of the companies in Silicon Valley that led the wave into Web 2.0: the participatory web.

Tara understands how the the participatory web is changing all of our relationships: B2C, B2B and C2C. She doesn’t believe in pushing messages or creating strong brands, only in the power of building relationships. She co-founded Citizen Agency in 2006 with the mission of teaching her clients how to work more effectively with the communities they serve and how to embrace and adjust... Read More.

Aaron Hurley is the founder and CEO of zeaLOG.com, where you can find him tracking his weight, meditation and his meager sleep regimen. Aaron is a SF Bay Area based web developer with more than 15 years of development behind him, beginning with a jurassic age Orlando Magic website in the early 90’s and more recently overseeing the development, production, and launch of a variety of large, scalable websites in the social networking space, including zeaLOG. Aaron also served as founder and CEO of FilmFX, a motion image processing software company with products primarily intended to make video look like film. You have likely seen FilmFX in music videos, television shows, and feature films including Pixar’s “The Incredibles.”

Katherine Hutchison is senior director for global risk management at PayPal Inc. In this role, Hutchison oversees PayPal’s global protection programs for buyers and sellers and manages the company’s dispute resolution programs. She is also responsible for driving strategy and product marketing for PayPal’s risk management programs.

Before joining PayPal, Hutchison was director of product and strategy at eFunds Retail Solutions, where she provided vision and insight for the company’s strategy and products. Prior to eFunds’ acquisition of ClearCommerce in 2005, she vice president of marketing and strategy at ClearCommerce, where her overall responsibility was the company’s global marketing efforts, including product management, marketing communications, brand strategy and corporate direction.

Hutchison, who has more than 25 years of high-tech experience, began her career as a... Read More.

Anand joined Microsoft in January 2005 as an Evangelist, Microsoft’s ambassador to the Northern California region. During his tenure there, he has been in the midst of several launches, such as Visual Studio, SQL Server, Vista, Office and many others. He has spoken at over a hundred conferences on a variety of topics. Anand is actively involved in the startup community in the Silicon Valley and works closely with Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. Before joining Microsoft, Anand worked for Cisco Systems’ New Business Ventures team, pioneering XML-based manageability solutions. During his five-year tenure as a Technical Lead and Software Engineer, Anand worked closely with customers to fine-tune his product features. Anand has extensive experience software methodologies, and has worked on several development platforms,... Read More.

Clay Johnson is the author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, and director of engagement for Expert Labs. He was the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008. After leaving Blue State, Johnson was the director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, where he built an army of 2000 developers and designers to build open source tools to give people greater access to government data. He was awarded the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Organizer of the year in 2009, was one of Federal Computing Week’s Fed 100 in 2010, and won the CampaignTech Innovator award in 2011.

Johnson’s combination of experience as a developer, working in politics, entrepreneurism,... Read More.

Jeffrey is your average 29-year-old tattooed metal-head with an eye for design and nose for tomfoolery. His time is spent as partner and Chief Creative Officer of the Chicago-based, community-business-centric skinnyCorp.

Jeffrey started out as a design partner for the Threadless website, but soon joined the team full-time. As CCO, Jeffrey oversees design and strategy for skinnyCorp’s numerous community-based web projects. These projects range in scale from Threadless, a multi-million dollar tee shirt business and ongoing design competition, to YayHooray, a just-for-fun design and technology community site.

Jeffrey’s work has been published numerous times, and he has had the pleasure of speaking to students and peers all over the world from MIT to the University of Copenhagen to CNN to NPR.

Farhang: Farhang Kassaei is a principal architect at eBay Marketplaces where he leads eBay platform design and architecture. During his career with eBay Farhang has been responsible for multiple infrastructure initiatives including identity and access management, open platform, user verification and risk, messaging, user generated content and user graph analysis and infrastructure. He is also a member of eBay Enterprise Architecture team.

Christopher Keohane is the product owner for the Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services Unity program. Unity is a social media based knowledge sharing and collaboration platform currently being deployed throughout the Lockheed Martin enterprise. Christopher has over 12 years of experience in IT and has held lead roles in information architecture, business process analysis and graphic design. Christopher holds an EcBA degree from Ursinus College and has an MBA with a specialization in computer information systems from Saint Joseph\’s University.

Aaron Kim is a Senior Managing Consultant and an Emerging Technologies Evangelist with IBM Global Business Services. He co-chairs the IBM Web 2.0 for Business community, with over 1,000 members worldwide, and has been a speaker at several conferences and client events on the topics of Enterprise Web 2.0 and Social Computing.

In his current role, Aaron has been active with clients and client teams in Canada, US, Spain, UK, Switzerland, Turkey and South Africa, acting as a catalyst to bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise, and routinely provides consulting advice to executives and decision makers in industries as diverse as banking, insurance, telecommunications, government, and media.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and an... Read More.

Peter is Chief Strategy Officer of Dachis Group. He is a leading advisor on social business, working with clients on strategy formulation and driving global industry discourse. Peter has been quoted by media outlets including CNN, CNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and featured as a speaker at events including SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo, and Dachis Group Social Business Summits. Peter was previously an analyst at Forrester Research and head of international marketing operations, e-commerce, and digital marketing at PUMA AG. Peter holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania.

Aaron Kimball is a software engineer at Cloudera, Inc., the Commercial Hadoop company. Aaron is the principle developer of Sqoop, the SQL-to-Hadoop database import/export tool. Aaron has been working with Hadoop since early 2007, and contributes actively to its development. Through Cloudera, he additionally provides training to developers and system administrators working with Hadoop. Aaron holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University, and an M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington.

Seven years ago, presenter Marshall Kirkpatrick worked at a
convenience store in a small town in Oregon, today he’s become one of
the most successful tech industry bloggers online (formerly lead
writer at both TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb) and is now the CEO of a
venture-backed company called Little Bird. Little Bird helps anyone
do the kind of work that Marshall did to make his career in the social
web: to find the right people, to discover key information, to act
fast and raise your voice by adding value to conversations on a global
stage.

If you’d like to chat or meet, please email or text me on my cell: 206-390-1057. Thanks! OR come to the BOF event at 7pm Thur, 4/2.

Amanda Koster is an internationally acclaimed photographer whose commercial and personal work has shown a consistent commitment to telling stories of real people, human rights, cultural diversity and global equality. She combines her anthropology background with media skills to create content as a means for powerful communication and storytelling.

Amanda founded SalaamGarage in 2007. SalaamGarage an organization that takes amateur media makers (photo, writing, video, etc.) to NGOs in developing countries to document the work of local organizations. Koster’s organization is a success because the travelers use their own voices and images to advocate in... Read More.

Micki Krimmel is the founder of Sugar Packet, Inc. – a tiny company with a big mission – to fundamentally change our relationship with material items.

Micki is well known in the Web 2.0 space for her work in online community development and her popular website and video show at www.Mickipedia.com. As a web consultant and advisor, Micki helps technology startups and new media companies build sustainable communities for authentic conversation and engaged participation.

Previously, Micki worked as Director of Community for Revver.com. She also built and managed the interactive department at Participant Productions, a media company founded with the express mission to engage audiences in movements for social change. While at Participant, Micki created the company’s first online activist community and led the interactive... Read More.

Siva Kumar is a seasoned technology entrepreneur with a history of building successful information technology and software companies. Prior to TheFind.com, Kumar co-founded eight other venture-funded start-ups in his career: Onebox (acquired by Openwave), BridgeSpan (acquired by Hall Settlement Systems), Impresse (acquired by PrintCafe/Creo Systems), Seven, Vialto (acquired by Cisco Systems), Scalent Systems and Telera (acquired by Alcatel). Currently, he sits on the boards of both TheFind.com and SPOCK and previously served terms as president of Scalent Systems, president and CEO of Impresse Corporation and chairman of Onebox.

Kumar previously worked as vice president of marketing at Chromatic Research (acquired by ATI) and held the positions of vice president of marketing and general manager at Frame Technology (IPO and later acquired... Read More.

He is a cofounder of Crowdlight, a new networking entertainment startup, ThingM, a ubiquitous computing hardware design, development and manufacturing company. Previously he was a founding partner of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consultantcy and Wired Digital’s User Experience lab. ‘Observing the User Experience,’ His book on user research methods, has been continuously in print since 2003 and is used by people around the world who want to understand the relationship between people and products. Reviewers have said that his 2010 book, ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design’ will ’change user experience practice forever.

Dynamic and entertaining, wine expert Roxanne Langer, will captivate you with stories from within the “world of wine.” As an insider, Langer has moved from the tasting rooms of Napa Valley to management positions in global wine sales, public relations and marketing, eventually occupying the executive director’s office of a prestigious international winery association. Author of “The 30-Minute Wine MBA” program, Langer frequently provides keynotes and breakout sessions at corporate and industry events. As the president of WineFUNdamentals, Langer is called upon by meeting planners and CEOs to educate and entertain their constituents at conventions, board retreats and sales meetings. Langer has traveled through 24 countries within Europe, Asia and North America talking, teaching, researching and learning about wine, all the while... Read More.

Carolyn Lawson is the Director of eServices for the Office of the CIO, State of California. She previously served as the California Public Utilities Commission CIO, and has been active in the national discussion of IT issues and policies related to eService delivery in government.

Ms. Lawson is currently examining the complex issues brought on by the cultural shift from a paper-based society to an e-based society, the new expectations of the general public, the changing face of our workforce and what that means to the delivery of governmental services. Ms. Lawson speaks and teaches nationally on these and other topics.

Elan Lee believes that if you’re bored, you’re doing something wrong. A self-identified entertainment-addict, Elan has spent his career finding and sharing ways to extract adventure from the world around us.

From surfing down the flooded streets of LA to broadcasting a radio drama over thousands of ringing payphones, Elan has pioneered breakthroughs in the area of entertainment and immersive gaming through his role as Creative Director for award winning projects such as I Love Bees, and The Vanishing Point, and Lead Designer on NIN: Year Zero.

Elan was Lead Game Designer for the XBOX, has spoken all over the world on the future of gaming, and is considered among the foremost Alternate Reality Game creators in the world. He has been featured... Read More.

Kim spent the past 2 years at Adaptive Path splitting time as a client-facing experience design lead and sharing her expertise through speaking and teaching about user-centric product design. She has spoken about and taught workshops on interaction design and design process in the US, Canada and Europe including such conferences as DUX07, MIX08, MEX, From Business to Buttons and Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive... Read More.

Charlene Li is an independent thought leader on emerging technologies, with a specific focus on social technologies, interactive media, and marketing. She has a blog, “The Altimeter” that discusses these topics at blog.altimetergroup.com.

She is also the co-author of the business bestseller, “Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies”, published by Harvard Business Press in May 2008.

Charlene is one of the most frequently-quoted industry analysts and has appeared on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN, and CNBC. She is also frequently quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USAToday, Reuters, and The Associated Press. She is a much-sought after public speaker and has presented frequently at top technology conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo,... Read More.

Heather is a nationally recognized consultant, author, speaker and expert on Search Engine Marketing. She is Google and Yahoo! Certified, and runs her own company, Lutze Consulting, a SEM agency which manages hundreds of thousands of dollars for advertisers every month. Heather has just recently released a new book called “The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Guide to Search Engine Marketing.”

As chief technology officer and senior vice president, Experience & Technology Organization, Kevin Lynch oversees Adobe’s experience design and core technology across business units. This role includes driving Adobe’s technology platform for designers and developers across desktops and devices, including Adobe® Flash® Player, Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe Flex® and Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system application runtime that bridges the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop with the real-time dynamic capabilities of the web. He also oversees Adobe’s developer relations program, including the integration of customers and partners in the development process through Adobe Labs and customer advisory councils.

Prior to being named CTO in 2008, Lynch served as senior vice president and chief software architect for Adobe’s Platform Business Unit.... Read More.

Prior to joining Real Branding, Susan held various management roles: Founder and President of a $10 million overseas office for Modem Media (acquired by Digitas, since acquired by Publicis), and Managing Director of InfoPlus, a privately held integrated marketing agency. She has a dozen international awards for marketing... Read More.

John Maeda is a world-renowned graphic designer, artist, and computer scientist and is a founding voice for “simplicity” in the digital age. He has pioneered the use of the computer for people of all ages and skills to create art. Maeda’s early work redefined the use of electronic media as a tool for expression by combining skilled computer programming with a sensitivity to traditional artistic concerns. This work helped to develop the interactive motion graphics that are prevalent on the Internet today. He also initiated the Design by Numbers project, a global initiative to teach computer programming to visual artists through a freely available, custom software system that he designed. He has displayed his work at numerous exhibitions, lectured extensively worldwide, and has published several... Read More.

Erin Malone, Principal with Tangible UX, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences as well as web and software applications and system-wide solutions. Prior to Tangible, she spent 4 years at Yahoo! leading the Platform User Experience Design team where they were responsible for building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, she led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!‘s registration system, developed the ux team’s intranet and worked on other cross-company initiatives. Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL, Creative Director at AltaVista and chief Information Architect for Zip2. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes... Read More.

Kathy Mandelstein currently oversees worldwide marketing programs, web and events for IBM Software Group focused on the business value of effective software delivery and IBM Rational. Kathy has been a pioneer in launching successful social media marketing efforts, as well as developing both dedicated communities and participating in established communities on the web. Over the past six years, Kathy led ibm.com/developerWorks and ibm.com/alphaWorks, as well as marketing programs to developers for all of IBM. Her past history includes leading various Web development and marketing teams in IBM Software Group. She has focused on software development teams and Business Partners for the last eleven years and began at IBM by leading the Java and e-business campaigns for these audiences. ... Read More.

With extensive senior management practical experience in international enterprise collaboration, Oliver previously managed the Sony PlayStation ‘WorldWide Studios’ collaboration extranet, and has worked with the American Management Association, Sun, Docent/SumTotal Systems, Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company on major initiatives around knowledge transfer and change management. Oliver has dual US/UK citizenship and has worked on Asian, European and American global enterprise collaboration, and spoken at various conferences. He is based in San Francisco. His personal blog is at www.olivermarks.com.

Ross Mayfield is Chairman, President & Co-founder of Socialtext, the first wiki company and leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. A noted blogger and industry expert, he is a serial and social entrepreneur. Mayfield has grown Socialtext to over 4,000 customers with Software-as-a-Service, Appliance and Open Source solutions. Mayfield partnered with Dan Bricklin, the creator of the first spreadsheet visiCalc, to co-develop and distribute SocialCalc. Socialtext is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP Ventures and Omidyar Network.

Previously, Mayfield served as VP of Marketing for a Fujitsu spinout and CEO of an enterprise risk management software company. Mayfield co-founded and served as president of RateXchange (AMEX:RTX), the leading B2B commodity exchange for telecom. Mayfield served as the marketing director of the... Read More.

Dave is the conference chair for Startonomics.com, and runs a monthly dinner series for entrepreneurs called Startup2Startup.com. He has been a guest lecturer at Stanford University for the nation’s first-ever course on building Facebook Apps. Dave is a board member for microfinance accelerator Unitus, advisor to microfinance lender Kiva.org, and a co-founder of the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network.

Andrew McLaughlin is Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. From November 2008-January 2009, Andrew served as a member of the Obama/Biden presidential transition team in Washington.

From 2004-2009 Director of Global Public Policy for Google Inc. From 1998-2005, Andrew was a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. From 1999-2002, Andrew worked to launch and manage the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), serving as Vice President, Chief Policy Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. ICANN is the Internet’s technical coordinating organization, overseeing its systems of unique identifiers, such as domain names and IP addresses.

From 2002-2003, Andrew taught at Harvard Law while working on Internet and telecom law reform projects in a number of developing countries, including... Read More.

Chris Messina arrived in San Francisco in 2004 as a volunteer for the Mozilla Foundation, leading the Spread Firefox community marketing project in raising over $220,000 in microdonations to launch Firefox to a worldwide audience with an ad in the New York Times.

He went on to co-found the Flock web browser and helped to organize the first-ever BarCamp in Palo Alto in 2005. Later, he co-founded Citizen Agency with Tara Hunt, opening a shared work environment called Citizen Space, giving rise to the coworking movement.

Chris now works on DiSo, an effort that he co-founded with Steve Ivy, to facilitate the development of building blocks for the open, social web. He is also a board member of the OpenID Foundation and works part-time for... Read More.

Michal has been building for the web since 1995, specializing in big, exciting datasets and the means to communicate and disseminate them to broad audiences for a variety of clients. He speaks publicly on these and other topics to academic and industry audiences, participates actively in a variety of open source development efforts, maintains an active weblog at mike.teczno.com, holds a degree in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.

Ellen S. Miller is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She is the founder of two prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics – the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign – and a nationally recognized expert on government transparency, campaign finance and ethics issues. Ms. Miller is a well-recognized public speaker, commentator, and writer on the issues of money, politics, and power. Her experience as a Washington advocate for more than 35 years spans the worlds of public interest advocacy, grass roots activism and journalism. In addition to her more than two decades of work on the issue... Read More.

Sarah Milstein is TechWeb’s General Manager and Co-Chair for Web 2.0 Expo; she is also coauthor with Tim O’Reilly of The Twitter Book. Previously, she was on the senior editorial staff at O’Reilly Media, where she founded the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) and led development of the Missing Manuals, a best-selling series of computer books for non-geeks. Before joining O’Reilly in 2003, Sarah was a freelance writer and editor, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. She was also the CSA program founder for Just Food, a local-food-and-farms non-profit, and co-founder of Two Tomatoes Records, a label that distributes and promotes the work of children’s musician Laurie Berkner.

Since graduating with MSc in Naval Engineering from Southampton University, where he learnt how to build boats and submarines, Alastair has spent the last 10 years in the online services industry.

During early years, he helped to build the first online market place for the global food commodities market, which provided marketing, auction and logistics capabilities to companies across Europe, Africa & the Far East. There he also became a professionally trained tea taster. Alastair then moved to dunnhumby, where he led the growth of its web-based marketing intelligence product to £20m in three years. Alastair joined dunnhumby’s Strategic Management Board in 2005 to head up the group’s Shopping Experience practice, a $60m+ business globally.

Alastair’s grandfather was the inspiration behind starting his own dot-com,... Read More.

Scott Monty heads up social media at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. Until recently, he was Consigliere for crayon, a strategic advisory group specializing in conversational marketing. Scott has been on the cutting edge of the marketing field for some time, having written the internationally recognized Social Media Marketing Blog at www.scottmonty.com since 2006.

Scott also plies his trade in his personal interests. He writes the Baker Street Blog and co-hosts and produces the first podcast for Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.

And as if that’s not enough, Scott’s excellent sense of humor is clearly evident in his voice over talent that spans from “the movie announcer guy” to practically the entire cast of The Simpsons. He regularly puts his wit,... Read More.

Lew Moorman is instrumental in driving strategic planning, product development and new business initiatives for Rackspace. He joined the company in April of 2000 and has served a variety of strategy and marketing roles throughout the company’s growth. Before joining Rackspace, Moorman held several positions at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, advising high technology clients on critical strategic issues.

As Rackspace Hosting’s Chief Strategy Officer, Lew Moorman drives strategic planning, product development and new business initiatives across the company. He also serves as President of Rackspace’s Cloud business, leading the company’s fastest growing business unit. He speaks frequently at industry events on cloud computing, hosting and the rapidly evolving world of IT.

Maxwell Newbould is the product owner and lead developer for the MySpace Open Platform’s OpenSocial container. He has been working for MySpace since March 2006, and was the first developer at MySpace’s Seattle office. Maxwell also provides engineering support for companies building applications for the world’s most popular social networking and lifestyle portal. Previously to MySpace, Maxwell worked in government, finance, travel and technology sectors.

Jake Nickell is a young, entrepreneurial mad man that programs community websites non-stop. He is the founder and CSO of skinnyCorp and Threadless.com, along with countless other side projects.

Jake dreamed up the Threadless concept in 2000 after winning a tee shirt design contest on a short-lived online design forum. The idea of sharing designs and opening them up for fellow artists’ critiques appealed to him; he thought Threadless would be a way to give back to the community by creating actual goods out of the submitted designs.

He led the growth of Threadless, which has culminated in more than 900,000 online users and two physical retail stores in Chicago, and has a number of other projects in the works.

Kate is part of the founding team at Dachis Corporation, an Austin based start-up delivering social business design services.

She joined from Nielsen Online, as the VP of Measurement Science, liaising between Research, Product, and R&D. Kate focused on developing internal methodologies and supportive technology, introducing established Nielsen data to consumer-generated media, and consulting on innovative client requests.

She completed her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Texas. Her research and publications concentrate on the role of language in relation to personality and interpersonal perception, including the development of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a probabilistic text-analysis software program. Her doctoral dissertation examined personality based on everyday behaviors and language.

Kate has spoken at industry events and conferences including WOMMA,... Read More.

Previously he launched the online video and podcast group at Ziff Davis where he produced and hosted 188 episodes of DL.TV (and learned more about Flash dev, routing tables, Content Delivery Networks, compression tools, RSS feeds, log file analysis and traffic verification than he ever thought he’d need to know,) and the products testing lab at TechTV, where he went on to co-host and program The Screen Savers, a live daily television show.

He’s also written hundreds of product reviews, along with features, and tech tips for outlets such as TechTV, PCMag, CNET, PC World, CPU, and Windows Sources.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. His original business plan was “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. He publishes books, runs conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators.

Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, a founder and board member of Safari Books Online and Maker Media, and on the boards of Code for America and PeerJ.

BRIANOBERKIRCH leads a social web consultancy and tries to make things people will truly love. He has thought thoughts and written words and scribbled diagrams and goaded people to use the Force for good in the service of companies like Nokia, Dow Jones, Sony and others. He loves startups and vintage cocktails, is from Louisiana, and, as such, is usually talking about what he is going to eat next. He is taken with words. He may blog overmuch at brianoberkirch.com.

Tero Ojanperä holds the position of Executive Vice President, Services. He is also a member of the Nokia Group Executive Board, a position held since 2005.

A sought-after industry commentator, author and speaker, he has played a defining role in the research and development work of Nokia’s business groups since joining the company in 1990. During 2008, he served as Executive Vice President, Entertainment and Communities with overall responsibility for Nokia offerings in music, video and TV, games, software distribution and social networking services.

“Dan Olsen <img src=‘http://www.linkedin.com/img/icon/icon_acct_15x15.gif’”:http://www.linkedin.com/in/danolsen98/ is CEO and Founder of YourVersion, a real-time discovery engine startup. Dan is a Web 2.0 entrepreneur and consultant with 19 years of high-tech experience. At Intuit, Dan led Quicken product management and launched an online brokerage. He also led product management at Friendster. Dan’s areas of expertise are product management/development, UI design, marketing, and measuring /optimizing key metrics.

Dan founded YourVersion in 2007 to build “Pandora for your real-time web content”: a real-time discovery engine that discovers the latest relevant web content tailored to your specific interests across news, blogs, Twitter, and videos. YourVersion also offers free apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android so you can stay on top of your interests on the... Read More.

Jeremiah Owyang is currently Senior Analyst at Forrester Research focused on Social Computing. Before Forrester, Jeremiah’s was responsible for the corporate evangelism at PodTech.net, and previously was leading the strategy and development of corporate web programs at Hitachi Data Systems, Exodus Communications, Cable and Wireless, and World Savings (now Wachovia). Jeremiah Owyang holds a Bachelors in in Marketing from San Francisco State University.

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, which is dedicated to the idea that government can work for the people, by the people, in the 21st century. She is an Ashoka fellow, and received the Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in 2012. Government Technology named her one of 2011’s Doers, Dreamers and Drivers in Public Sector Innovation and the Huffington Post named her the top Game Changer in Business and Technology the same year. She is known for her TED talk, Coding a Better Government, and is a frequent speaker. Previously, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O’ReillyRead More.

Chris Palmer is a senior security consultant with iSEC Partners, a strategic digital security company. Prior to iSEC, Chris worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation where he provided technical management and analysis of several key EFF projects and provided technical advice to EFF (and other) lawyers. Prior to the EFF, Chris built web applications.

Alex Payne is API Lead at Twitter, a social network of individuals sharing short status updates via the web, SMS, IM, and an extremely popular API. Since taking on the support and development of Twitter’s API, the service has grown to hundreds of millions of requests per day. Alex’s background is in web application development and information security, and his code has powered mission-critical operations, political campaigns, and non-profit initiatives. Alex lives and works in San Francisco.

Sean Power is a consultant, analyst, author and speaker. He is the co-founder of Watching Websites, a boutique consulting firm focusing on early stage startups, products and non-profits as they emerge and mature in their niches. He has built professional services organizations and traveled across North America delivering engagements to Fortune 1000 companies. He helps executives understand their competitive landscape and the future of their industry. He has done technical edition for Troubleshooting Linux Firewall for Addison-Wesley and co-authored Complete Web Monitoring for O’Reilly media with Alistair Croll.

Sean has had first-hand experience creating and implemented social computing strategies with larger companies like MTV and smaller startups like Akoha. He is active in the social computing space, using Twitter and blogs as his communication... Read More.

Tom Preston-Werner is a cofounder and chief executive officer of GitHub, a web site that makes it easy for users to collaborate on software projects and share code. This site has attracted a community of more than 3.5 million developers and strives to lower the barriers of collaboration by building powerful features into its products, making it easier for users to contribute and write better code, faster.

Preston-Werner also invented the Gravatar, a globally recognized image that follows its user around the internet to help identify posting on blogs, web forums, or other internet activities. He sold Gravatar in 2007.

He lives and works in San Francisco. The weather there is strange, but he loves... Read More.

Scott Rafer has been helping Internet publishers and users take advantage of the latest technologies and trends since 1995. Today, that means delivering services for social publishing and discovery. As CEO of Lookery, Rafer is creating an ad network and user-targeting service that supports the growth of social applications, starting with Facebook. He is also co-founder of Mashery, which manages API and developer programs for web services providers, and chairman of Winksite, which makes it easy for individuals as well as big publishers to share media across mobile and social networks. Earlier, Rafer was CEO of MyBlogLog until Yahoo! acquired the company in January 2007. Prior to MyBlogLog, he twice tried and failed to build blog search companies—in 1998 and 2003. Before... Read More.

DubMeNow is Manoj’s brainchild and as CEO of the company his focus is to drive the strategic vision and direction, build the executive team and establish strategic partnerships. Manoj is an entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience starting and growing firms in the Information Technology arena. His experience spans IT and management in the healthcare, eLearning and federal consulting verticals as well as development of enterprise mobile applications. Prior to DubMeNow, Manoj founded Astegic Inc, an information technology firm specializing in providing commercial and government solutions. Manoj built Astegic into a multi-million dollar organization with offices around the world. He has over 10 years of experience in the IT industry and has management experience in the healthcare, eLearning, Federal IT... Read More.

Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Aza is also the founder of Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it’s first week of operation, and Bloxes.com which is a modular 3D cardboard building block for adults. Aza is currently Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, where he has lead projects like Ubiquity.

David Recordon is the Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebook, where he leads open source and open standards initiatives. He joined Facebook from Six Apart where he focused on platform strategies, and previously worked at VeriSign in the emerging business group. David has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies, such as OpenID and OAuth. He collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the Web. In 2007, he became the youngest recipient of the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award.

Arena Reed is Lead User Experience Designer at Grockit, a startup practicing Agile Design & Development to create an online learning game where people learn by teaching eachother. Previously, she was Lead Designer at Pivotal Labs, an Agile software services company and the makers of Pivotal Tracker, an Agile planning tool. Arena has over 3 years experience working as a team member with Agile software developers and over 12 years experience doing design and illustration including visual and interactive design for software applications.

As Senior Product Manager for Flash Media Server Solutions in the Dynamic Media Organization at Adobe, Laurel Reitman drives the strategy and direction for Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server which provides content protection of Adobe Flash technology including FLV and F4V audio and video files that are downloaded and played locally. In addition, Laurel is responsible for Adobe Flash Media Encoder which enables users to encode live video to stream through the Flash Media Server.

Prior to joining the Dynamic Media Organization, Reitman was Senior Product Manager for Adobe’s Platform Technologies working across Flash Player, Flex, Adobe AIR, and Adobe Reader. In this role, she helped drive cross business unit initiatives and drive alignment on key strategic areas within Adobe.

Rheingold has been building web apps since 1996 and has spent the last 5 years figuring out how to actually make a business out of doing it. In 2001 he started the web services company OneMatchFire.com and in 2004 started Dogster.com and Catster.com which have become the definitive online communities for pet lovers. What once started as night and weekend projects have turned into a 3 year old, 14 person, profitable mini-network of passion-centric communities. Since then Rheingold has spoken about DIY web development, nurturing community, and making big things happen on micro-budgets.

Eric Ries became a Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, after co-founding and serving as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Bunchball, FooMojo, Causes and KaChing.

Prior to OATV, Bryce sourced and lead a number of successful early stage investments at Wasatch Venture Fund, a Draper Fisher Jurvetson affiliate. In 2004, Bryce co-founded the Open Source Business Conference (sold to IDG) in order to spark a conversation around commercializing the highly disruptive technologies and services emerging from the open source community. Prior to Wasatch, Bryce was a member of a small team at vertical search pioneer Whizbang! Labs. While at WhizBang!, he defined and launched the FlipDog.com division (sold to Monster Worldwide). He began his career in technology doing large enterprise software deployments, saving his employer from... Read More.

Marty Roberts oversees marketing and business development for thePlatform and has more than a decade of diverse experience in product management and marketing. Since joining thePlatform in 2006, Mr. Roberts has helped thePlatform develop and launch a series of new product initiatives, create the industry’s largest ecosystem of technology partners for online video, and coordinate numerous external communications programs and events. Hundreds of media companies now use thePlatform to manage and monetize billions of professionally-produced videos views annually, including: the Associated Press, BBC, Cablevision, CBS College Sports, CNBC, Comcast, Corus Entertainment, Cox Communications, ExerciseTV, Gannett/USA Today, HIT Entertainment, PBS, Sony BMG, Starz, Time Warner Cable, and numerous others. Prior to joining thePlatform, Marty was a Director at GiftCertificates.com,... Read More.

David S. Rose, described as “the Father of Angel Investing in New York” by Crain’s New York Business, is a serial entrepreneur and Inc 500 CEO who is Founder and Chairman of New York Angels, one of the most active angel investment groups in the country. He has personally helped to fund over 50 startup companies in technology and new media, and was described by Red Herring magazine as the “Patriarch of Silicon Alley”. As an entrepreneur, he is CEO of Angelsoft, which provides the web-based ASP back-end for over 275 angel groups in 22 countries, and as The Pitch Coach, he is regarded as the country’s leading presentation trainer for entrepreneurial financing road shows.

Philip Rosedale founded San Francisco-based Linden Lab in 1999, and has led the creation of the virtual world of Second Life from initial concept to a market-leading virtual world, with a robust economy and a global population.

As a pioneer in the virtual world industry, Rosedale is actively involved in the strategy, development and design of Linden Lab’s products, including the world of Second Life and the Second Life Grid platform.

Rosedale is known for his entrepreneurial approach to new technologies, starting a network software company when he was 17. In 1995 he created an innovative internet video conferencing product, which was later acquired by RealNetworks, where he went on to become Vice President and CTO. In 1999, the advent of consumer broadband and... Read More.

John Rourke is a serial entrepreneur in technology and media ventures. Since 1995, John has focused exclusively on ventures and projects in the internet space. At Bantam Networks his role is to oversee all Company operations and spearhead the go-to-market strategy. John is also the co-founder of Aperio Networks, LLC, a Web 2.0 internet development and consulting company that John founded with Bantam CTO Henry Poydar in 2003. Developing both B2B and B2C web applications, the Ruby-on-Rails firm publishes user-generated content sites such as ConferencingNews.com, KeyPeopleDirectory.com, EventSpan.com, and WebinarWire.com in the web collaboration space, as well as other B2C promotional sites for brands. John started his work in the internet sector in 1995 as the creator of SmartRoute Systems’ award-winning SmarTraveler.com, the internet’s... Read More.

As an attorney in Microsoft’s Interoperability Group, David Rudin specializes in legal, policy, and business issues arising from standards. David works closely with the product teams on topics covering the entire standards lifecycle, including the formation of standard setting organizations, governance, technology submissions, patent licensing obligations, disclosures, implementation issues, and general counseling. David’s practice focuses on media, DRM, and online standards related to areas such as optical disc format and content protection, music metadata, home networking, and website syndication. David has worked with standards organizations including the Open Web Foundation, SMPTE, W3C, DVDCCA, DLNA, DECE, DDEX, DVB, and AACS. Before joining Microsoft, David practiced law in Dow Lohnes’s Media and Information Technology group and was... Read More.

Douglas Rushkoff, PhD, is a world-renowned media theorist whose twelve books, including Life, Inc and Program or Be Programmed., have won prestigious awards and have been translated into thirty languages. He is a commentator on CNN and a contributor to The Guardian, Discover, and NPR. He also made the PBS documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He advocates for digital literacy at Codecademy.com, and teaches at NYU and The New School. He lives in New York, with his wife Barbara and daughter Mamie.

Alon Salant is a founder and owner of Carbon Five, a software development firm dedicated to delivering high value software through an agile collaboration with its clients. Alon has over ten years experience delivering web applications to his clients. His areas of expertise include Agile Coaching, software design, automated testing and rubber-hits-the-road software development. He has written articles and book contributions for O’Reilly and spoken at JavaOne, CodeCon and Bay Area-based user groups on technology and process topics. He holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ryan is currently the Director of Platform at Twitter where he works with developers building myriad of experiences on top of 140 characters. Prior to Twitter, he was the Director of Consumer Products at Skyhook Wireless where he led product initiatives that leveraged the WPS platform in consumer applications and experiences. Ryan was also one of the founding members of the W3C Geolocation API Working Group. He is an avid fan of hockey and wine.

Michael Scherotter is a Media Experience Evangelist for Media and Communications with Microsoft Corporation based out of San Francisco. As part of Microsoft’s Communications Sector evangelism team, Michael focuses on interactive client solutions for communications and media companies. Educated as an architect, Michael brings a sense of creativity and design to synergistic software development. Throughout his 14-year career in software development, Michael has specialized in combining software in innovative ways. He architected and developed desktop CAD applications for Boise Cascade Corporation, managed software development teams and engaged with partners as a Business Solutions Architect at Mindjet Corporation. Michael has a Bachelors of Architecture and a Masters of Architecture specializing in Design Tool Development. Michael lives in Fairfax, California with his wife Liz, and two... Read More.

An Internet-industry veteran and innovator, Deborah passionately believes in the power of technology to connect people, communities and business. She currently advises both start-ups and the Fortune 50 on the impact of social software on business strategy & customer relationships. She is also currently Procter & Gamble’s Strategic Adviser for Social Media and is developing a P&G Social Media Innovation Lab designed to actively explore and gain insights on the impact of the social web on business.

Previously, Deborah was Marketing Director at Six Apart, ran her own marketing consultancy firm, was a management consultant at AnswerThink and spent five years at Citibank where she developed many of the global bank’s first internet initiatives. One of her proudest accomplishments was launching the Downtown Info Center,... Read More.

Jason D. Schwartz is primarily interested in developing social applications that appeal to mainstream users. In that vain, he closely watches over the entrepreneur community at Angelsoft.net, the Angel Investment industry deal flow management platform and blogs about the topic at RobberBaronBlog.com

Toby Segaran is the author of the O’Reilly title, “Programming Collective Intelligence”, Amazon’s top-selling AI book, and the Data Magnate at Metaweb Technologies. Prior to Metaweb he founded and sold a biotechnology software company. He loves applying data-mining algorithms to everything ranging from pharmaceutical trials to bloggers and online dating.

Clara helped kick off the Social CRM movement in 2007 with her Faceconnector application, which integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM. She is author of the newly released bestseller, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff about Facebook and Twitter for business, which has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, CRM Magazine, and is being used as a textbook at Stanford and Harvard Business School.

Clara recently left her position as Product Line Director of the AppExchange at salesforce.com to found Hearsay Labs, which provides social media tools enabling sales, marketers, and IT to manage customer engagements across Facebook, Twitter, and their own websites. Clara has also worked at... Read More.

Dave Shih is a Senior Visual Designer at Hot Studio, a people-centered design firm based in San Francisco. While at Hot Studio, Dave worked on various Agile driven projects including Viscape and Cisco EOS. Prior to Hot Studio, Dave was a visual designer at Yahoo!, where he worked on numerous sites including Yahoo! Sports, My Yahoo!, and the FIFA World Cup. Dave holds a B.A. degree in Design from UCLA.

Clara Shih joined salesforce.com in 2006 and is responsible for Enterprise Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy. Previously, she was the product line director of AppExchange, salesforce.com’s online business applications marketplace, for which she led the development of the Checkout payment services for partner applications. Independently, Clara developed Faceconnector (formerly Faceforce) in 2007, the first business application on Facebook. She is the author of a new book, “The Facebook Era” (Prentice Hall) about how online social networking is tranforming customer relationships and how we approach sales and marketing.

Previously, Clara worked in strategy and business operations at Google and as a software developer at Microsoft. Clara holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science and economics from Stanford University, as well as a Master’s Degree... Read More.

Mark Silva founded Real Branding in 1994 to pioneer the emerging field of digital communications for brands. He serves as senior consultant and agency sponsor for many of Real Branding’s long-term clients as well as emerging interests. Silva brings over 20 years of traditional and online advertising experience directing strategic planning, account and creative teams with his passionate, visionary approach to integrated communications.

At Real Branding Silva has lead online brand strategy for blue-chip companies including AOL, ABC, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Corona, Diageo, Disney, HBO, Scottish & Newcastle, Unilever and Warner Bros. Before founding the agency, Silva drove strategic planning, creative direction and new business development at high-tech and recruitment advertising agencies including FCB, TarGet, and Omnicom/Bernard Hodes. He was instrumental in... Read More.

Robin Sloan is VP of Strategy at Current, a participatory media company co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt. Current produces news by
collaborating with its audience; it runs a cable and satellite TV network, available in 58 million homes around the world, and a social news site, current.com.

Before Current, Robin worked at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school and think tank in St. Petersburg, Florida. There, he co-produced EPIC 2014 (http://robinsloan.com/epic), a viral video view of the future of media. Before Poynter, he graduated from Michigan State, where he majored in economics and minored in wasting time on the internet.

Joseph Smarr is a software engineer at Google, focused on socially enabling the web using open standards. Previously, he was Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer, where he led their initiative to open up the social web, starting with co-authoring the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web in 2007. He has served of the Board of Directors of the OpenID Foundation and OpenSocial Foundation. A frequent speaker and community participant in the social networking and web development communities, Joseph has built web applications for many years. Joseph has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence. His website is josephsmarr.com, or just Google him!

Marc Smith is a sociologist and Chief Social Scientist at Telligent Systems, a provider of fine quality social media platforms and systems. Smith specializes in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and is now leading the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent. Smith lives and works in Silicon Valley, California.

Smith is the co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups.

Smith’s research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many “groups” in cyberspace produce public goods... Read More.

Doug Solomon leads technology strategy efforts at IDEO, working with clients to effectively leverage technologies that create both business and social value. With more than twenty-five years of leadership experience in the information technology industry, Doug has a particular interest and experience in collaborative technologies that enable greater community engagement and participation. Prior to IDEO, Doug was Vice President of Investments at Omidyar Network, helping pioneer a new approach to socially impactful investing. He was also Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Strategy Officer at both Apple and Palm, in addition to holding leadership roles at Interval Research and several technology startups. Doug began his career by applying marketing and other business concepts to public health programs in Asia, where he... Read More.

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. Steve is co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught High Performance Web Sites at Stanford and frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, The Ajax Experience, SXSW, and Web 2.0 Expo.

Stephan M. Spencer, M.Sc., is Founder and President of Netconcepts, a leading natural search marketing firm. Clients include Cabela’s, HSN, AOL, SuperPages.com and Discovery Channel, to name a few.

Stephan is an author of the upcoming O’Reilly book “The Art of SEO” with co-authors Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola, and Eric Enge, due out in the Summer. Stephan is also a Senior Contributor to MarketingProfs.com and to Practical Ecommerce, a monthly columnist on Search Engine Land, and he’s contributed to Multichannel Merchant, DM News, Catalog Age, Catalog Success, Building Online Business, Unlimited, and NZ Marketing magazine among others. He is co-author of the analyst report “The State of Search Engine Marketing 1.0 – New Strategies for Successful Cataloging” published by Catalog Age.

Rob Spiro is the co-founder of Aardvark, a fifteen-person startup in San Francisco working on Social Search. As assistant curator of birds, he leads user research and product design. Previously, Rob worked in consulting and co-founded Mifly, a mobile software startup. Rob holds a BA in History from Yale.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference... Read More.

Entrepreneur, co-founder of Yokudo and CoreMedia, co-editor of Enterprise 2.0 The Art of Letting Go, optimist, TEDster, German Fairness Prize Recipient 2009, working on an economic model for a world of abundance

Alex Stamos is a Founding Partner of iSEC Partners, Inc, a strategic digital security organization. Alex is an experienced security engineer and consultant specializing in application security and securing large infrastructures, and has taught multiple classes in network and application security. He is a leading researcher in the field of web application and web services security and has been a featured speaker at top industry conferences such as Black Hat, CanSecWest, DefCon, SyScan, Microsoft BlueHat and OWASP App Sec. He is a contributing author of “Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0” and holds a BSEE from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ted is a product manager at IBM for Lotus Connections. As a product manager, Ted works with multiple IBM teams to enable colleagues, customers, and partners on the business value of social software. Prior to joining the product management team, Ted was a Premium Service Manager and software engineer for IBM’s Lotus Brand. Ted holds 19 IBM software product certification, has published multiple articles and books, holds a social tagging patent, and is often called to present to customers, partners, and colleagues for conferences such as Lotushpere, The View, and DNUG.

Jonah Stein is the founder of Its The ROI, a San Francisco Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing company. In 2007, he coined the term Virtual Blight to help web publishers understand the impact of Spam, scammers and other parasitic marketers on the value of web properties.

Jonah has been responsible for planning, designing and executing the web vision of companies ranging from venture funded start ups to Fortune 500 companies. Through two business cycles of venture capitalists pouring money like chum into the feeding frenzy, he has focused on creating functional web businesses with measurable ROI. Its The ROI currently assists companies with all aspects of Search Engine Marketing and Jonah serves on the advisory boards of several start... Read More.

Sebastian studied at HPI, at Potsdam University in Germany, and carries a Master of Science in Critical Software Engineering from Lancaster University, UK. He has been working with the Imagineering team on multiple projects, related to virtual worlds, widgets and sensor networks. Before he started his work with the SAP Imagineering team Sebastian worked for multiple small companies and start-ups. Sebastian currently heads the Imagineering Sensor Network Initiative.

Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm that tracks the impact of the Internet on offline consumer purchase behavior and its disruption of traditional media. SMI covers consumer adoption and ad models across a range of market segments, including local search, online yellow pages, online newspapers and classifieds, mobile search, social media and multi-channel shopping. Sterling is also the lead analyst for LocalMobileSearch, an advisory service from Opus Research.

Before founding SMI, Sterling ran The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media program. Prior to The Kelsey Group, Sterling was at TechTV where he helped produce “Working the Web,” the first national television show dedicated to e-business and the Internet. Prior to TechTV he was a founding... Read More.

Kevin Tams is Director of Web Architecture and leads the web development team with Extra Space Storage. He has been involved in the development and management of websites for the past ten years. He has been testing websites for the past four years and has run tests for start-ups, educational, non-profit, and retail companies. Kevin managed the implementation of the Google Website Workout contest for Extra Space Storage. He has experience with the major testing products.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Information Systems from Utah State University, and a Masters of Information Systems Management (Techno MBA) from Brigham Young University.

Joel is Chief Executive Officer of Krillion. Prior to founding Krillion, Joel was the Director of Business Development and chief negotiator for the Yahoo! Search business unit, where he was responsible for establishing and managing strategic partnerships and executing new revenue-producing channels and business initiatives including Yahoo!‘s Search, Access and subscription services businesses. In addition, he previously managed day-to-day aspects of the company’s sponsored search relationship with Overture Services prior to Yahoo!’s acquisition of the company.

Prior to his work for Yahoo! Search, Joel worked in business development for Yahoo! Consumer Services, where he was responsible for development and implementation of Yahoo!-branded Internet access services including services offered through alliances with SBC and other broadband and narrowband providers.

Gentry began his work at IDEO as a human factors specialist, and has formal training in interaction design (Stanford), counseling psychology (Santa Clara University), and community psychology (The Peabody School, Vanderbilt).

Prior to IDEO, Gentry had worked as an interaction designer for IBM Almaden (USER), Reactivity, London Road design, as well as as an independent contractor. He worked as an adult, family, child, and school counselor in the San Francisco Bay area, has made two documentary shorts (one of which aired on the nationally syndicated show Democracy Now), and is an amateur photographer.

Starting January 1, 2008, Anssi Vanjoki is Executive Vice President of the new Markets unit. In this function Anssi is responsible for sales, marketing, manufacturing and logistics of all Nokia products and services. He is a member of the Nokia Group Executive Board, a position held since 1998.

A highly respected brand and marketing authority, Anssi has been a visionary force in Nokia’s efforts to address mobility markets. His work has focused on developing the Nokia brand and the convergence of mobility and the Internet. From 2004, he served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, with overall responsibility for the Nokia Nseries multimedia computer device fleet and Nokia services.

Anssi joined Nokia in 1991 and was named Vice President, Sales, Nokia Mobile... Read More.

Jeffrey Veen is a founder and CEO of Typekit, a cloud-based font subscription service for web designers. Jeffrey was also one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006, where he managed the user experience group responsible for some of the largest web apps in the world. As a consultant, he has been involved in designing the leading blog and social media applications on the web, including Blogger, TypePad, Flickr, and and National Public Radio.

Previously, Jeffrey served as the Executive Director of Interface Design for Wired Digital and Lycos Inc., where he managed the look and feel of HotWired, the HotBot search engine, Lycos.com and others.

Dr. Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.

Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry.

Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing. He was named the... Read More.

Matt leads the Interaction Design department at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. There he focuses his days on reinventing interactive marketing as developed for the web, mobile/cellular devices, networked console gaming platforms, digital signage, and interactive retail environments. In his current position he has helped develop sites and initiatives for Volkswagen, Burger King, Microsoft, Dominos, Old Navy, Coke Zero, Miller Lite, and American Express OPEN.

Prior to joining CP+B, Matt worked at R/GA on the Nike account. While working there he helped create and redesign a number of award winning sites including NikeID.com, NikeGridiron.com and NikeRunning.com. He also served as a gaming consultant for other clients including Target, Bank of America, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and Verizon. During his career his work has been... Read More.

Michael Walsh is a member of the Social Media Club of Seattle. The organization enables members to share best practices, establish ethics and standards, and promote media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media.

Professionally, Michael is the Senior Communications Manager for Environmental Sustainability at a Fortune 50 company. Prior to this role, he worked as both a digital marketing manager and a strategic management consultant in the public sector.

Michael serves as a commentator on a number of topics, including marketing, Green IT, digital healthcare, and social media. He is a regular contributor to TechNet Magazine and maintains a personal Twitter microblog on sustainable technology (walshtechnet).

Michael graduated with his BA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University and MA in International Relations... Read More.

Chris Wanstrath is a co-founder of GitHub and an Isaac Asimov fan. He lives in San Francisco, never has enough time to work on his own open source projects, and tweets at http://twitter.com/defunkt. Originally at CNET, he had to spend a year consulting before he was able to work solely on GitHub.

Simon Wardley is a Researcher for CSC’s Leading Edge Forum, a global research and thought leadership community dedicated to helping large organizations become more successful by identifying and adopting Next Practices at the growing intersection between business and information technology.

Simon’s focus is on the intersection of IT strategy and new technologies, and his most recently published research report is entitled, The Future is More Predictable Than You Think: A Workbook for Value Chain Mapping. Simon has also covered topics including Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts: Strategies for an Increasingly Open Economy, Learning from Web 2.0 and A Lifecycle Approach to Cloud Computing.

Simon has spent the last 15 years defining future IT strategies for companies... Read More.

David Weekly is the founder and chairman of PBwiki and currently also serves as the company’s Chief Product Officer.

He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Stanford University where he attended as a Presidential Scholar (top 2% of applicants) and was a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition.

David wrote the first layman’s description of the MP3 audio format and has worked for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato.

David is the co-founder of SuperHappyDevHouse, a global programming gathering that regularly attracts hundreds of coders and also founded the California Community Colocation Project, which offered colocation services to hundreds of non-profits and helped define copyright law in the seminal OPG v Diebold case.

Over a decade of working on the web as both a designer and developer has given M. Jackson Wilkinson crucial background to bring to his role as User Experience Strategist at Viget Labs, in which he helps both start-ups and traditional businesses create engaging and pleasurable experiences for their users online. Jackson has worked with a diverse set of clients, ranging from WalMart and Microsoft to the pending re-launch of Odeo.com to the Government of Canada to non-profits like the National Breast Cancer Coalition. Jackson is a regular speaker on topics relating to user experience and design process both in DC and abroad and, as lead organizer of Refresh DC, the DC Talks Series, and BarCampDC, is one of the leading cultivators of the booming... Read More.

Christina is the newly minted General Manager of Social Networking at MySpace. Previously she was Principal Product Manager at Linkedin, running the activity stream, communication products, and launched the events application. Before that she founded a startup where she developed the collaborative blogging tool PublicSquare. As well, she founded Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design and the Institute for Information Architecture; and built the Search and Marketplace design team at Yahoo!, leading reinventions of the search and shopping product designs.

She is also a teacher, having written the best selling Information Architecture: Blueprints for the web and has spoken on the topic of the human experience in information spaces at conferences worldwide.

Twenty years ago, a video game that you could neither win nor lose was inconceivable-unless you were Will Wright. With five years of college under his belt and no degree, twenty-something year old Will had the idea of creating a game based on designing and building cities. In achieving that goal, Will created a new genre in gaming and within it, one of the best-loved game franchises in history establishing Will Wright as a visionary within the world of video game design.

The idea for SimCity struck as will was designing his first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984) a game in which helicopters attacked islands. Realizing he preferred building islands to piloting attack ‘copters, Will partnered with “idea guy” Jeff Braun to create a... Read More.

Steve Wylie is a regular blogger and General Manager of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference which is produced by Techweb. Steve formerly co-chaired Techweb’s annual Interop conferences in Las Vegas and New York. Prior to running conferences, Steve managed Interop’s renowned InteropNet, including a multi-vendor test lab geared to evaluate, improve and showcase early implementations of open-standard IT infrastructure technologies. Steve is based in San Francisco, California.

Alex Zambelli has been closely involved with digital media technology development at Microsoft for over 6 years. He tested and developed software on product teams that delivered Windows Media Player 9, Windows Media Player 10 Mobile and VC-1 codecs before finally putting his hands-on experience to use as a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft VC-1 Encoder. Zambelli was instrumental in ensuring VC-1 codec’s continued adoption and success in the streaming media industry. He is currently working as a Technical Evangelist for Silverlight, focusing on Silverlight media strategies and consulting on key Silverlight partner deployments such as NBC Olympics 2008 and Akamai SmoothHD.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a founder and Director of Software Engineering for Engine Yard, a scalable Ruby hosting platform. He has been active in the ruby community for over 4 years with contributions to many open source projects such as Rails, Merb, Rack and Rubinius. He is the author of Deploying Rails Application for the pragmatic programmers and is an active speaker at many ruby and Cloud computing based events.